Inside Paris's Forgotten UtopiaThere's a passage in the The Shock of the New when art critic Robert Hughes begins to criticize the grands ensembles, a series of postmodern housing projects that started to spring up around Paris in the 1950s. These structures, Hughes wrote, signified “the new landscape of urban despair—bright, brutish, crime-wracked, and scarred by the vandalism they invite.” Hughes wrote this in 1980, right aro
